Donor Care With Salesforce

Fundraising and donor care with Salesforce – Part 1 of 3

This is part one of our thoughts on using Salesforce CRM for fundraising and donor management. There are many options that can be used through Salesforce but firstly, it’s important to get things right from the start.

Lay the foundations

A key item to fundraising is knowing your existing and potential donors. This means starting with the fundamentals of having a great database and setting it up in a way that will allow you to manage all of the complex relationships.

For Salesforce CRM, the key is to work with the data model and not to fight it as I have seen happen a few times. Work with the basics of the Organization (Accounts) and related contacts. Then look at the Non-profit Starter Pack and the add-ons for:

• Contacts & Organisations
• Households
• Affiliations
• Relationships

You can see more info on the Non-profit start pack in a previous post at: http://aakonsultpayments.com/nonprofit-starter-pack-for-salesforce/

Know your donors

1. Segmentation

Investigate the key attributes you are seeking in donors and potential donors. Segment your donors into: new donors, targeted donors, philanthropic organisations, government grants etc. These key attributes can be assigned automatically, such as type of donor and be tracked such as total donations, donations this year/last year, largest donor (individual or organisation) etc.

Once you have the attributes of your donors, you can start to develop a marketing and relationship plan based on these segmentations.

2. Social contacts

Use the built-in social media component of Salesforce. If you have not already done so, enable social contacts and accounts in Salesforce. This will leverage your social networks to get a better understanding of your donors and philanthropists. For enabling social contacts, see the online help at: https://help.salesforce.com/apex/HTViewHelpDoc?id=contacts_social_enable.htm&language=en

3. Activity management

Even with a small organisation, it’s easy to lose track of how many donors have been contacted and who has not. It’s also too easy to spend your time with a few key favourite donors. To help manage activities, use the standard Salesforce Activity management features:

• Use Tasks and Events
• Synchronise with Outlook (or your email client)
• When sending emails, use the send and add (or bcc option if you are not using Outlook)
• When mobile, do updates using Salesforce1 or apps such as logger
• Use Salesforce Chatter and Chatter groups for internal discussions, updates and uploading documents, pictures and linking to relevant websites and news articles.

4. Keep your data clean

Make sure you have strategies in place to tidy your existing data and keep it clean into the future. Some simple steps include:

• Agree on a standards, such as naming, storing of phone numbers etc.
• Agree on the minimum amount of information you should have on each contact. If necessary, make the field required, but keep the number of required fields to a minimum.
• Install AppExchange apps, such as dupe-blocker to stop duplicates
• Use data cleansing tools, such as Demand Tools by CRM fusion
• Use tools such as Experian – address validation, TotalCheck by Sensis (Australia) to populate your address, email and phone details from external data sources. This will save you time and money with mailouts in reduced mailout returns.
• Use PaymenUs2us powerful de-duping capabilities to matching online donations with existing contacts.